After taking some time off, Valve's Steam Dev Days game dev meetup is back this year with a newfound focus on VR.
However, there's likely to be other notable news out of the two-day event, which kicked off today in Seattle, Washington.
Defender's Quest dev and occasional Gamasutra blogger Lars Doucet, for example, gave a talk today alongside Valve's Jeff Bellinghausen about Valve's plans for the Steam Controller and its API, which include better promotion for the controller and expanding the API to support other gamepads -- starting with the PS4.
For many Steam game devs, this is an opportunity to get together in Valve's stomping grounds and learn from both Valve representatives and each other. It's also a place where Valve speaks openly (if quietly, given that members of the media are not typically invited to Dev Days) about its plans for the future, and thus it's always fun to skim Twitter and see what Steam Dev Days attendees are saying about their time at the show.
With that in mind, we've gone ahead and collected a smorgasbord of attendee tweets (about everything from a new VR controller prototype to the state of paid mods on Steam) from Steam Dev Days below to give anyone who isn't attending a sense of what's happening at Valve's game dev conclave:
Big steam takeaway: the number of games released spiking is balanced in part by tons of new players.
— Megan Spookums Fox (@glassbottommeg) October 12, 2016
...who almost all do NOT speak English
New Vive controllers coming soon. Prototype available at #SteamDevDays pic.twitter.com/C5HMvOrwt4
— Robert Merki (@robmerki) October 12, 2016
First look at #valve's prototype finger sensing controllers. I tried them. Awesome. #SteamDevDays pic.twitter.com/0B3SK48ld7
— Leigh_Christie (@Leigh_Christie) October 12, 2016
Valve going all-in on VR-- adding VR support to SteamOS and making investments in content. #SteamDevDays
— Keith Kaisershot (@ablitter) October 12, 2016
"We have over 1000 new VR users on Steam every day"#SteamDevDays
— Oshry @ SteamDevDays (@DaveOshry) October 12, 2016
600 VR apps (so far) all competing over those 365k users. If each user buys 5 games, avg sales/title will be about 3k units. #SteamDevDays
— Dan Afraidelman (@Dan_Adelman) October 12, 2016
"We are going to update Steam in a major way in a couple of weeks" #SteamDevDays
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) October 12, 2016
"Paid mods are the future" #SteamDevDays
— Garry Newman (@garrynewman) October 12, 2016
#SteamDevDays "We're adding support for all popular game controllers to the Steam API."
— Lars @ SteamDevDays (@larsiusprime) October 12, 2016
I'll talk about this in detail later today!
(He did, in fact, speak about this in depth today -- this is what he said.)
Regional growth on Steam. Asia is exploding. #SteamDevDays pic.twitter.com/l9IORssdwP
— Shams Jorjani (@ShamsJorjani) October 12, 2016
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